How demand for rubber led to the gory exploitation of native populations in South America and Africa

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28-04-2025

On 27 August 1883, the earth shook again.
This time the volcano Krakatoa, in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, erupted. News of the colossal eruption was quickly carried on gutta-percha-coated underwater cables between Java and Singapore eventually to London, and thence to Europe and the United States, all within twenty-four hours of the eruption.
Gutta-percha is a tree exudate and relative of rubber from Southeast Asia with waterproofing properties shared with rubber, but with resilience to saltwater that outstrips it. Gutta-percha was not the only latex material to be associated with Krakatoa's eruption. Some 15 miles from Krakatoa, sheltering in the lee of a nearby island was the German ship Berbice, under the command of Captain William Logan. It was carrying thousands of gallons of combustible paraffin under wooden decks, but miraculously escaped annihilation from the pyroclastic eruption that had fiery sparks falling from the sky onto the ship's masts and sails. Sheltered in Captain Logan's personal chambers was a handwritten note addressed to the curator of the Botanical Gardens in Buitenzorg (present-day Bogor) in Java.
In the accompanying package were five seedlings of Hevea brasiliensis, a portion of the living confetti scattered around various British colonies in the Far East with the directive to establish rubber plantations, and thereby free the British from Brazilian and Belgian rubber hegemony. The Berbice, Logan and the seedlings all survived. These and other plants brought by stealth from the Amazon, specimens that were mercifully resistant to the South American Leaf Blight (SALB) caused by the Ascomycete fungus Pseudocercospora ulei, allowed the establishment of large rubber-producing plantations to supply the burgeoning demand. More importantly, this new supply of rubber accelerated the demise of the Congo and Amazon as primary sources of rubber, and the associated slavery and abuse of indigenous communities.
The drudgery of these indigenous tappers was photographically documented by travellers to the area, among them Walter Hardenburg in Putumayo in the Amazon and Lady Alice Seeley Harris in the Belgian Congo. The ensuing investigation by British Consul Roger Casement would expose the abuses to the world.
With maritime sayings such as 'at 40 degrees latitude there is no law; at 50 degrees latitude there is no God', and with winds named 'the Roaring Forties', 'the Furious Fifties' and 'the Screaming Sixties', sailors were merely expressing their experiences. Before GPS and satnav, sailors on featureless ocean voyages took bearings from the sun's risings and settings, star declinations, chronometers recording time differences, sextants, compasses, the behaviour of animals and how their vessels reacted to wind and water currents. There is no historical record of the ocean crossings of the earliest Australians or Polynesians; yet their achievements still evoke awe and disbelief. The earliest recorded circumnavigators, Ferdinand Magellan, Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, had to contend with previously unmapped currents and winds. With the advent of sailing ships and navigational aids, trans-oceanic voyages became longer and more frequent.
Navigating the treacherous waters off the southern tips of Africa and South America presented enormous challenges. Cape Agulhas near Africa's Cape of Good Hope means 'cape of needles' in Portuguese. The word 'needles' cleverly referenced both the needle-like rocks that could wreck a ship and a curious observation of the time that north and magnetic north were mysteriously aligned at this place. The stormy weather and underwater tows caused by the merging of the Indian and Atlantic Ocean currents made disaster a very real possibility.
A similar situation exists at Cape Horn, at the tip of South America. These waters were considered so treacherous that even famous sailor-navigators such as Ferdinand Magellan in 1519 and Thomas Cavendish in 1586 negotiated passages in the archipelago near Tierra del Fuego rather than rounding Cape Horn. Such voyagers filled in blank ocean maps with potential ports of call and trading posts to re-provision, repair and otherwise break up long journeys. Thus, trans-oceanic trading routes became established, and the easterly winds near the equator that helped drive the ships from east to west were called trade winds. North of the equator, westerly winds pushed ships towards Europe and Africa.
This set up a clockwise route where ships leaving European ports could hug the coastline down to Africa, take on board slaves, travel westwards with the easterly trade winds to the West Indies, South, Central and North America where they would unload the slaves, and load up rubber, cotton, tobacco, sugar and other merchandise produced using slave labour. Then they would use the westerly trade winds to blow them back to European ports. This three-step journey came to be called the Atlantic Triangle.
Other seafaring routes also opened up to the Far East: the overland journey from Europe to Asia along the Silk Road was replaced by the maritime spice route to the Moluccas (part of the Indonesian archipelago). But the maritime journey was difficult because of the enormous distances and the navigation challenges around the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. Two canals changed all this: the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869 between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, rendering travel around the Cape of Good Hope null, and the Panama Canal, which opened in 1914, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, making it unnecessary to navigate Cape Horn. Trading grew enormously in response, and the whole world was linked by commerce. The main cash crops for trade were spices, grain, sugar, tobacco, tea, coffee, silk, cotton and, of course, rubber. All of these crops were labour-intensive, and the use of forced human labour soon followed.